Soon the swift horses drew this fair god and goddess nigh the wooded hills, whose distant blue, now changed into a variously-shaded green, stood before them like old Babylonian walls, overgrown with verdure; while here and there, at regular intervals, the scattered peaks seemed mural towers; and the clumped pines surmounting them, as lofty archers, and vast, out-looking watchers of the glorious Babylonian City of the Day. Catching that hilly ah-, the prancing horses neighed; laughed on the ground with gleeful feet. Felt they the gay delightsome spurrings of the day; for the day was mad with excessive joy; and high in heaven you heard the neighing of the horses of the sun; and down dropped their nostrils' froth in many a fleecy vapor from the hills.
From the plains, the mists rose slowly; reluctant yet to quit so fair a mead. At those green slopings, Pierre reined in his steeds, and soon the twain were seated on the bank, gazing far, and far away; over many a grove and lake; corn-crested uplands, and herd's grass lowlands; and long-stretching swales of vividest green, betokening where the greenest bounty of this earth seeks its winding channels; as ever, the most heavenly bounteousness most seeks the lowly places; making green and glad many a humble mortal's breast, and leaving to his own lonely aridness, many a hill-top prince's state.
But Grief, not Joy, is a moralizer; and small moralizing wisdom caught Pierre from that scene. With Lucy's hand in his, and feeling, softly feeling of its soft tinglingness; he seemed as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightnings; and by sweet shock on shock, receiving intimating foretastes of the etherealest delights of earth.
Now, prone on the grass he falls, with his attentive upward glance fixed on Lucy's eyes. "Thou art my heaven, Lucy; and here I lie thy shepherd-king, watching for new eye-stars to rise in thee. Ha! I see Venus' transit now;-lo! a new planet there;-and behind all, an infinite starry nebulousness, as if thy being were backgrounded by some spangled veil of mystery."
Is Lucy deaf to all these ravings of his lyric love? Why looks she down, and vibrates so; and why now from her overcharged lids, drops such warm drops as these? No joy now in Lucy's eyes, and seeming tremor on her lips.
"Ah! thou too ardent and impetuous Pierre!"
"Nay, thou too moist and changeful April! know'st thou not, that the moist and changeful April is followed by the glad, assured, and showerless joy of June? And this, Lucy, this day should be thy June, even as it is the earth's!"
"Ah, Pierre! not June to me. But say, are not the sweets of June made sweet by the April tears?"
"Ay, love! but here fall more drops, — more and more;- these showers are longer than beseem the April, and pertain not to the June."
"June! June! — thou bride's month of the summer, — following the spring's sweet courtship of the earth, — my June, my June is yet to come!"
"Oh! yet to come, but fixedly decreed;-good as come, and better."
"Then no flower that, in the bud, the April showers have nurtured; no such flower may untimely perish, ere the June unfolds it? Ye will not swear that, Pierre?"
"The audacious immortalities of divinest love are in me; and I now swear to thee all the immutable eternities of joyfulness, that ever woman dreamed of, in this dream-house of the earth. A god decrees to thee unchangeable felicity; and to me, the unchallenged possession of thee and them, for my inalienable fief.-Do I rave? Look on me, Lucy; think on me, girl."
"Thou art young, and beautiful, and strong; and a joyful manliness invests thee, Pierre; and thy intrepid heart never yet felt the touch of fear;-but-"
"But what?"
"Ah, my best Pierre!"
"With kisses I will suck thy secret from thy cheek! — but what?"
"Let us hie homeward, Pierre. Some nameless sadness, faintness, strangely comes to me. Foretaste I feel of endless dreariness. Tell me once more the story of that face, Pierre, — that mysterious, haunting face, which thou once told'st me, thou didst thrice vainly try to shun. Blue is the sky, oh, bland the air, Pierre;-but-tell me the story of the face, — the dark-eyed, lustrous, imploring, mournful face, that so mystically paled, and shrunk at thine. Ah, Pierre, sometimes I have thought, — never will I wed with my best Pierre, until the riddle of that face be known. Tell me, tell me, Pierre;-as a fixed basilisk, with eyes of steady, flaming mournfulness, that face this instant fastens me."
"Bewitched! bewitched! — Cursed be the hour I acted on the thought, that Love hath no reserves. Never should I have told thee the story of that face, Lucy. I have bared myself too much to thee. Oh, never should Love know all!"
"Knows not all, then loves not all, Pierre. Never shalt thou so say again;-and Pierre, listen to me. Now, — now, in this inexplicable trepidation that I feel, I do conjure thee, that thou wilt ever continue to do as thou hast done; so that I may ever continue to know all that agitatest thee, the airiest and most transient thought, that ever shall sweep into thee from the wide atmosphere of all things that hem mortality. Did I doubt thee here;-could I ever think, that thy heart hath yet one private nook or corner from me;-fatal disenchanting day for me, my Pierre, would that be. I tell thee, Pierre-and 'tis Love's own self that now speaks through me-only in unbounded confidence and interchangings of all subtlest secrets, can Love possibly endure. Love's self is a secret, and so feeds on secrets, Pierre. Did I only know of thee, what the whole common world may know-what then were Pierre to me? — Thou must be wholly a disclosed secret to me; Love is vain and proud; and when I walk the streets, and meet thy friends, I must still be laughing and hugging to myself the thought, — They know him not;-I only know my Pierre;- none else beneath the circuit of yon sun. Then, swear to me, dear Pierre, that thou wilt never keep a secret from me-no, never, never;-swear!"
"Something seizes me. Thy inexplicable tears, falling, falling on my heart, have now turned it to a stone. I feel icy cold and hard; I will not swear!"
"Pierre! Pierre!"
"God help thee, and God help me, Lucy. I can not think, that in this most mild and dulcet air, the invisible agencies are plotting treasons against our loves. Oh! if ye be now nigh us, ye things I have no name for; then by a name that should be efficacious-by Christ's holy name, I warn ye back from her and me. Touch her not, ye airy devils; hence to your appointed hell! why come ye prowling in these heavenly purlieus? Can not the chains of Love omnipotent bind ye, fiends?"
"Is this Pierre? His eyes glare fearfully; now I see layer on layer deeper in him; he turns round and menaces the air and talks to it, as if defied by the air. Woe is me, that fairy Love should raise this evil spell! — Pierre?"
"But now I was infinite distances from thee, oh my Lucy, wandering baffled in the choking night; but thy voice might find me, though I have wandered to the Boreal realm, Lucy. Here I sit down by thee; I catch a soothing from thee."
Now they rolled swiftly down the slopes; nor tempted the upper hills; but sped fast for the plain. Now the cloud hath passed from Lucy's eye; no more the lurid slanting light forks upward from her lover's brow. In the plain they find peace, and love, and joy again.
"It was the merest, idling, wanton vapor, Lucy!"
"An empty echo, Pierre, of a sad sound, long past. Bless thee, my Pierre!"
"The great God wrap thee ever, Lucy. So, now we are home."
VI
After seeing Lucy into her aunt's most cheerful parlor, and seating her by the honey-suckle that half clambered into the window there; and near to which was her easel for crayon-sketching, upon part of whose frame Lucy had cunningly trained two slender vines, into whose earth-filled pots two of the three legs of the easel were inserted; and sitting down himself by her, and by his pleasant, lightsome chat, striving to chase the last trace of sadness from her; and not till his object seemed fully gained; Pierre rose to call her good aunt to her, and so take his leave till evening, when Lucy called him back, begging him first to bring her the blue portfolio from her chamber, for she wished to kill her last lingering melancholy-if any indeed did linger now-by diverting her thoughts, in a little pencil sketch, to scenes widely different from those of Saddle Meadows and its hills.