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Three Weeks

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<h2 id="id00508" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER X</h2> That evening it was so warm and peaceful they dined at the wide-open balcony windows. They could see far away over the terrace and down to the lake, with the distant lights towards Lucerne. The moon, still slender and fine, was drawing to her setting, and a few cloudlets floated over the sky, obscuring the stars here and there. The lady was quiet and tender, her eyes melting upon Paul, and something of her ring-dove mood was upon her again. Not once, since they had been on the Bürgenstock, had she shown any of the tigerish waywardness that he had had glimpses of at first. It seemed as if her moods, like her chameleon eyes, took colour from her surroundings, and there all was primitive simplicity and nature and peace. Paul himself was in a state of ecstasy. He hardly knew whether he trod on air or no. No siren of old Greek fable had ever lured mortal more under her spell than this strange foreign woman thing—Queen or Princess or what you will. Nothing else in the world was of any consequence to him—and it was all the more remarkable because subjection was in no way part of his nature. Paul was a masterful youth, and ruled things to his will in his own home. The lady talked of him—of his tastes—of his pleasures. There was not an incident in his life, or of his family, that she had not fathomed by now. All about Isabella even—poor Isabella! And she told him how she sympathised with the girl, and how badly he had behaved. "Another proof, my Paul, of what I said today—no one must make vows about love." But Paul, in his heart, believed her not. He would worship her for ever, he knew. "Yes," she said, answering his thoughts. "You think so, beloved, and it may be so because you do not know from moment to moment how I shall be—if I shall stay here in your arms, or fly far away beyond your reach. You love me because I give you the stimulus of uncertainty, and so keep bright your passion, but once you were sure, I should become a duty, as all women become, and then my Paul would yawn and grow to see I was no longer young, and that the expected is always an ennui when it comes!" "Never, never!" said Paul, with fervour. Presently their conversation drifted to other things, and Paul told her how he longed to see the world and its people and its ways. She had been almost everywhere, it seemed, and with her talent of word-painting, she took him with her on the magic carpet of her vivid description to east and west and north and south. Oh! their entr'actes between the incoherence of just lovers' love were not banal or dull. And never she forgot her tender ways of insinuated caresses—small exquisite touches of sentiment and grace. The note ever of One—that they were fused and melted together into one body and soul. Through all her talk that night Paul caught glimpses of the life of a great lady, surrounded with state and cares, and now and then there was a savage echo which made him think of things barbaric, and wonder more than ever from whence she had come. It was quite late before the chill of night airs drove them into their salon, and here she made him some Russian tea, and then lay in his arms, and purred love-words to him, and nestled close like a child who wants petting to cure it of some imaginary hurt. Only, in her tenderest caresses he seemed at last to feel something of danger. A slumbering look of passion far under the calm exterior, but ready to break forth at any moment from its studied control. It thrilled and maddened him. "Beloved, beloved!" he cried, "let us waste no more precious moments. I want you—I want you—my sweet!" * * * * * At the first glow of dawn, he awoke, a strange sensation, almost of strangling and suffocation, upon him. There, bending over, framed in a mist of blue-black waves, he saw his lady's face. Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats' they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while twisted round his throat he felt a great strand of her splendid hair. The wildest thrill as yet his life had known then came to Paul; he clasped her in his arms with a frenzy of mad, passionate joy. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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