For a moment the Philosopher sat in stricken silence looking on
the ground. He had a strange disinclination to look at the girl
although he felt her eyes fixed steadily on him. But in a little
while he did look at her and spoke again.
“To carry gifts to an ungrateful person cannot be justified and
need not be mourned for. If your love is noble why do you treat it
meanly? If it is lewd the man was right to reject it.”
“We love as the wind blows,” she replied.
“There is a thing,” said the Philosopher, “and it is both the
biggest and the littlest thing in the world.”
“What is that?” said the girl.
“It is pride,” he answered. “It lives in an empty house. The head
which has never been visited by the heart is the house pride lives
in. You are in error, my dear, and not in love. Drive out the knave
pride, put a flower in your hair and walk freely again.”
The girl laughed, and suddenly her pale face became rosy as the
dawn and as radiant and lovely as a cloud. She shed warmth and
beauty about her as she leaned forward.
“You are wrong,” she whispered, “because he does love me; but he
does not know it yet. He is young and full of fury, and has no
time to look at women, but he looked at me. My heart knows it and
my head knows it, but I am impatient and yearn for him to look at
me again. His heart will remember me to-morrow, and he will come
searching for me with prayers and tears, with shouts and threats.
I will be very hard to find to-morrow when he holds out his arms
to the air and the sky, and is astonished and frightened to find
me nowhere. I will hide from him to-morrow, and frown at him when
he speaks, and turn aside when he follows me: until the day after
to-morrow when he will frighten me with his anger, and hold me with
his furious hands, and make me look at him.”
Saying this the girl arose and prepared to go away.
“He is in that house,” said she, “and I would not let him see me
here for anything in the world.”
“You have wasted all my time,” said the Philosopher, smiling.
“What else is time for?” said the girl, and she kissed the
Philosopher and ran swiftly down the road.
She had been gone but a few moments when a man came out of the
grey house and walked quickly across the grass. When he reached
the hedge separating the field from the road he tossed his two
arms in the air, swung them down, and jumped over the hedge into
the roadway. He was a short, dark youth, and so swift and sudden
were his movements that he seemed to look on every side at the one
moment although he bore furiously to his own direction.
The Philosopher addressed him mildly.
“That was a good jump,” said he.
The young man spun around from where he stood, and was by the
Philosopher’s side in an instant.
“It would be a good jump for other men,” said he, “but it is only
a little jump for me. You are very dusty, sir; you must have
travelled a long distance to-day.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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