The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor
the new thoughts she had planted in his soul, of the windows she had opened wide to the sunlight. To tell her that he loved her, that he longed to touch even the tips of her fingers, that the thought of caressing her lips and her eyes and her hair drove the blood coursing madly through his veins. That to dream of what life could be like, if she were really his own, was a dream of intoxicating bliss.
And something of all this gleamed in his eyes as he gazed up at her--and Theodora, all unused to the turbulence of emotion, was troubled and moved and yet wildly happy. She looked away down the centre avenue, and she began to speak fast with a little catch in her breath, and Hector clinched his hands together and gazed at a beetle in the grass, or otherwise he would have taken her in his arms.
"Tell me the story of all these avenues," she said; "tell me a fairy story suitable to the day."
And he fell in with her mood. So he began:
"Once upon a time there was a fairy prince and princess, and a witch had enchanted them and put them in a green forest, but had set a watch-dog over Love--so that the poor Cupid with his bow and arrows might not shoot at them, and they were told they might live and enjoy the green wood and find what they could of sport and joy. But Cupid laughed. 'As if,' he said, 'there is anything in a green wood of good without me--and my shafts!' So while the watch-dog slept--it was a warm, warm day in May, just such as this--he shot an arrow at the prince and it entered his heart. Then he ran off laughing. 'That is enough for one day,' he said. And the poor prince suffered and suffered because he was wounded and the princess had not received a dart, too--and could not feel for him."
"Was she not even sympathetic?" asked Theodora, and again there was that catch in her breath.
"Yes, she was sympathetic," he continued, "but this was not enough for the prince; he wanted her to be wounded, too."
"How very, very cruel of him," said Theodora.
"But men are cruel, and the prince was only a man, you know, although he was in a green forest with a lovely princess."
"And what happened?" asked Theodora.
"Well, the watch-dog slept on, so that a friendly zephyr could come, and it whispered to the prince: 'At the end of all these alles, which lead into the future, there is only one thing, and that is Love; he bars their gates. As soon as you start down one, no matter which, you will find him, and when he sees your princess he will shoot an arrow at her, too.'"
"Oh, then the princess of course never went down an alle," said Theodora--and she smiled radiantly to hide how her heart was beating--"did she?"
"The end of the story I do not know," said Lord Bracondale; "the fairy who told it to me would not say what happened to them, only that the prince was wounded, deeply wounded, with Love's arrow. Aren't you sorry for the prince, beautiful princess?"
Theodora opened her blue parasol, although no ray of sunshine fell upon her there. She was going through the first moment of this sort in her life. She was quite unaccustomed to fencing, or to any intercourse with men--especially men of his world. She understood this story had himself and herself for hero and heroine; she felt she must continue the badinage--anything to keep the tone as light as it could be, with all these new emotions flooding her being and making her heart beat. It was almost pain she experienced, the sensation was so intense, and Hector read of these things in her eyes and was content. So he let his voice grow softer still, and almost whispered again:
"And aren't you sorry for the prince--beautiful princess?"
"I am sorry for any one who suffers," said Theodora, gently, "even in a fairy story."
And as he looked at her he thought to himself, here was a rare thing, a beautiful woman with a tender heart. He knew she would be gentle and kind to the meanest of God's creatures. And again the vision of her at Bracondale came to him--his mother would grow to love her perhaps even more than Morella Winmarleigh! How she would glorify everything commonplace with those tender ways of hers! To look at her was like looking up into the vast, pure sky, with the light of heaven beyond. And yet he lay on the grass at her feet with his mind full of thoughts and plans and desires to drag this angel down from her high heaven--into his arms!
Because he was a man, you see, and the time of his awakening was not yet.
X
Man is a hunter--a hunter always. He may be a poor thing and hunt only a few puny aims, or he may be a strong man and choose big game. But he is hunting, hunting--something--always.
And primitive life seems like the spectrum of light--composed of three primary colors, and white and black at the beginning and ending of it. And the three colors of blue, red, and yellow have their counterparts in the three great passions in man--to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.
And white and black seem like birth and death--and there is the sun, which is the soul and makes the colors, and allows of all combinations and graduations of beautiful other shades from them for parallels to all other qualities and instincts, only the original are those great primary forces--to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.
And if this is so to the end of time, man will be the same, I suppose, until civilization has emasculated the whole of nature and so ends the world! Or until this wonderful new scientist has perfected his researches to the point of creating human life by chemical process, as well as his present discovery of animating jellyfish!
Who knows? But by that time it will not matter to any of us!
Meanwhile, man is at the stage that when he loves a woman he wishes to possess her, and, in a modified form, he wishes to steal her, if necessary, from another, or kill the enemy who steals her from him.
But the Sun of the Soul is there, too, so the poor old world is not in such a very bad case after all.
And how the _bon Dieu_ must smile sadly to Himself when He looks down on priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas. Trying to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and glorifying it all with the Sun of the Soul.
And all of you who are great reasoners and arguers will laugh at this ridiculous little simile of life drawn by a woman; but I do not care. I have had my outburst, and said what I wanted to. So now we can get back to the two--who were not yet lovers--under their green tree in the Forest of Marly.
"But you must be able to guess the end," Theodora was saying; "and oh, I want to know, if all the roads were barred by love--how did they get out of the wood?"
"They took him with them," said Lord Bracondale, and he touched the edge of her dress gently with a wild flower he had picked in the grass, while into his eyes crept all the passion he felt and into his voice all the tenderness.
Now if Theodora had ever read _La Faute de L'Abb Mouret_ she would have known just what proximity and the spring-time was doing for them both.
But she had not read, and did not know. All she was conscious of was a wild thrilling of her pulses, an extraordinary magnetic force that seemed to draw her--draw her nearer--nearer to what? Even that she did not know or ask herself. Beyond that it was danger, and she must fly from it.
"I do not want to talk of any of those things to-day," she said, suddenly dropping her parasol between them. "I only want to laugh and be amused, and as you were to devise schemes for my happiness, you must amuse me."
He looked up at her again and he noticed, for all this brave speech, that her hands were trembling as she clutched the handle of her blue parasol.
Triumph and joy ran through him. He could afford to wait a little longer now, since he knew that he must mean something, even perhaps a great deal, to her.
And so for the next half-hour he played with her, he skimmed over the surface of danger, he enthralled