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Page 14
"What, then, would you have?" I said.
"Ask him," she replied.
But the little god looking sidelong was mute in his grey regard.
"Why do you not run away? What keeps you here?"
"You ask many questions, stranger! Who can escape? To live is to
remember. To die--oh, who would forget! Even had I been weeping, and
not merely mocking time away, would my tears be of Lethe at my mouth's
corners? No," said Anthea, "why feign and lie? All I am is but a
memory lovely with regret."
She rose, and the myrtles concealed her from me. And I, in the midst
of the dusk where the tiny torches burned sadly--I turned to the
sightless eyes of that smiling god.
What he knew, being blind, yet smiling, I seemed to know then. But
that also I have forgotten.
I whistled softly and clearly into the air, and a querulous voice
answered me from afar--the voice of a grasshopper--Rosinante's.
V
_How should I your true love know
From another one?_
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
But even then she was difficult finding, so cunningly had ivy and
blackberry and bindweed woven snares for the trespasser's foot.
But at last--not far from where we had parted--I found her, a pillar
of smoke in the first shining of the moon. She turned large,
smouldering eyes on me, her mane in elf locks, her flanks heaving and
wet, her forelock frizzed like a colt's. Yet she showed only pleasure
at seeing me, and so evident a desire to unburden the day's history,
that I almost wished I might be Balaam awhile, and she--Dapple!
It would be idle to attempt to ride through these thick, glimmering
brakes. The darkness was astir. And as the moon above the valley
brightened, casting pale beams upon the folded roses and drooping
branches, if populous dream did not deceive me, a tiny multitude was
afoot in the undergrowth--small horns winding, wee tapers burning.
Presently as with Rosinante's nose at my shoulder we pushed slowly
forward, a nightingale burst close against my ear into so passionate a
descant I thought I should be gooseflesh to the end of my days.
The heedless tumult of her song seemed to give courage to sounds and
voices much fainter. Soon a lovelit rival in some distant thicket
broke into song, and far and near their voices echoed above the elfin
din of timbrel and fife and hunting-horn. I began to wish the moon
away that dazzled my eyes, yet could not muffle my ears.
In the heavy-laden boughs dim lanterns burned. There, indeed, when we
dipped into the deeper umbrage of some loftier tree, I espied the
pattering hosts--creatures my Dianeme might have threaded for a
bangle, yet breeched and armed and fiercely martial.
Down, too, in a watery dell of harts-tongue, around the root of a
swelling fungus, a lovely company floated of an insubstantiality
subtile as taper-smoke, and of a beauty as remote as the babes in
children's eyes.
We passed unheeded. Four bearded hoofs rose and fell upon the moss
with all the circumspection snorting Rosinante could compass. But one
might as well go snaring moonbeams as dream to crush such airy beings.
Ever and again a gossamer company would soar like a spider on his
magic thread, and float with a whisper of remotest music past my ear;
or some bolder pigmy, out of the leaves we brushed in passing, skip
suddenly across the rusty amphitheatre of my saddle into the further
covert.
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