Kingston, with an effort, tore himself from the white mist of fantasy
that had closed in upon his mind. The gloom suddenly held dangers;
they loomed ahead. He had a dim sense that something unseen was moving
towards him out of the swirling uncertainties around.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We shall have to stay here till the clouds
lift a bit. I simply can’t pretend to know my way. We should probably
wander half over the moors, and go on in a circle till we got
hopelessly lost or fell in a pothole. What a fool I was not to watch
the sky! However, if the worst comes to the worst, you can shelter in
that little shanty, and I don’t expect Gundred will be anxious; she
never is.’
‘Read what this creature has written,’ said Isabel. ‘It sounds better
in a man’s voice.’
Kingston looked down at the straggling stone letters at his foot. ‘I
love you,’ he read. Then he looked up at Isabel.
She was facing him. The motto lay between them. Her face, against the
luminous pallor of the mist, was burning, aglow, filled with a strange
triumphant challenge. Suddenly, with an appalling crash of thunder,
the fantastic world in which he had lived so long shattered and broke
about his head. He saw the call in her eyes, understood it, answered to
it, helplessly as a bound slave. This was the one woman in the world.
He had known her since the beginning of time, been with her since the
creation; now at last she threw aside her veils, and stood before him,
no longer a stranger, but the lost part of his own soul--that lost part
for which he had so long been vainly seeking. Now, in an instant, he
recognised the cause of all his enmity, his unrest, his gnawing hunger,
the incessant angry cravings which had tormented him. Hitherto he had
not seen the truth; he had guessed it. And those guesses, painful,
secret, stifled--they had engendered all the throbbing hostility, all
the restless enmity with which he had regarded this half-recognised
intruder into his life. Now he knew her, now his heart heard the lost
language for which it had pined, now his soul stood complete again in
the acquisition of its lost part.
Isabel saw that the answer to her call had come. At last she was known.
‘Old friend,’ she whispered, smiling into his eyes.
‘You--you,’ he stammered. ‘And I did not understand. It is You. I have
never seen you before, Isabel, and yet--and yet I have known you all my
life.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account