As I rode back to Rebursa alone, I could see before me the pale swollen face of the Princess Aldoina, and the gloomy fatigue of the servants, and the two grey shadows following the chair, and all the details of the strange procession. Some essential part of me had been left behind in the great cloister, but still I felt in my inmost being the joy of being alone again.
I recalled once more to my mind the gestures of farewell at the gate, the marvellous depth in the eyes of the prisoners, and the dreamlike view of the garden vanishing away behind the three beautiful forms. And at the same time all the other phantoms of the intense life I had lived in those few hours crowded into my soul like a store of varied and disordered riches, gathered up that they might be rearranged for the adornment of my secret kingdom.
“What opulence!” said the Dæmon, appearing to me, not without joy and pride. “What magnificence in a single day! Thou couldest not have better served thine end, which is to give life to everything, to extract life from the most barren things. Now, dost thou acknowledge the wisdom of my morning admonition? Dost thou not bless the sternness ofthy long restraint, since it now yields thee this intoxicating fruit? Thy power of poetry, like thy will, has no limit. Everything that is born and exists around thee is born and exists by reason of the breath of thy will and thy poetry. And thou art nevertheless living in a very real order of things, because nothing is more true in the world than the things of poetry.”
The day was sinking over the undulating valley of the Saurgo, and the slanting rays turned the brown fields into gold, while the light clouds sat in a circle on peaks of rock resembling the highest seats in an amphitheatre. They sat there in feminine attitudes, waiting for the evening to robe them with purple.
“Now, thou couldest make even salt bear fruit,” said the Dæmon to me. “Wherever thy spirit turns, abundance springs up. But thou hast with thee also the favour of fortune; thou hast entered the unknown and unforeseen not as one feeling his way and exploring with hesitation, but as one who is expected and called to gather in the harvest on a field where the richest fruit awaits him—fruit still intact, and ready to fall into his hands whenever in sunshine or in shadow he pleases to stretch them out. Thou hast entered a cloistered garden, delicious and terrifying as the garden of the Hesperides. Happiness has smiled to thee in three shapes, standing between madness and death, like statues of pure white marble between two black columns. Is there not some meaning for thee in that symbol?”
“Oh despot,” I replied, “there is surely some hidden meaning in the symbol thou declarest to me, and I shall discover it. But since the perfection of that trinity attracts me, and since it is necessary for my purpose that I should choose, I am perplexed in spirit, and not without fear of being deluded like a common mortal.”
And the Dæmon: “Not thy fears of the morning alone, but those of the evening also are vain! Nor is that thy only error; for before now, in the presence of the blessed ones, after having composed beautiful music out of the beauty of their bare hands thou didst regret that thou couldest not carry them all away at once to thy home; thou didst rebel against the injuries of prejudice and custom. Now, in thus doing, thou didst humble thyself, not only to own the power of the laws of others, but also to disown the power of thy own ideal, which alone is sacred. Why dost thou aspire to the legitimate possession of the body when the ideal figures already adorn the house of thy dreams with their triple grace? Thou couldest not remove the three prisoners from their dungeon without breaking the enchantment which transfigures them. Countless mysterious waves of affinity flow between the depths of those lives and the silent places where they have suffered and awaited thee. Their grace, their desolation, and their pride draw the fascination which enthralled thee from the hidden virtue of innumerable elements. Even so, noble plants, with their long roots subdivided into myriads of fibres, absorb from the verybosom of the earth those immortal energies which are pressed towards the light by the rising force in the stalk, and are crowned in the miracle of the flower and the perfume. Canst thou, oh Poet, imagine Eglae, Arethusa, or Iperthusa chased from their garden? When Heracles, clothed with stars, penetrated into the western paradise to rob its golden apples, he forbore to carry away the daughters of Night, for even his brutal soul felt that he would have defaced, and perhaps destroyed, the heavenly mystery of their beauty.”
“Oh despot,” I said then, “I am thinking of Him who is to come.”
And the Dæmon: “It is well that this should be always the sum of thy thoughts. But once before, the necessity of choice appeared to thee as a cruel trial, a source of sorrow and inevitable sacrifice, and thy heart shrank from it. Reflect that there is no goddess so worthy of being called upon to preside at a birth as Sorrow. Nothing in the world is lost, and wonderful things may sometimes be born of tears. Reflect that the highest power of will does not manifest itself in the readiness to choose from many things offered, nor in the firmness which resists various impulses, but rather in the art of giving the clearness and dignity of acknowledged and directed powers to the instinctive motions of nature. Reflect that there is always some way of being equal to the event in all the chances of this most uncertain life. There was once a man who, beside a tyrant able by one sign of his hand to condemn him to death, woresuch a look, that bystanders doubted which of the two was the master. Be thou like unto him, and handle the events of life in a royal spirit.”
The dome of heaven was tinged with pale hyacinthine blue, and the olive-trees reflected its calm on their silver locks, which concealed the painful contortions of their black trunks. The clouds on the rocky peaks were not yet clothed in purple, but in robes of more delicate hue, making them droop; yet one here and there raised a proud head among her companions and aspired to a crown of stars.
“In the meantime compose thy music,” pursued the Dæmon, “out of the wonderful things which are born of affinity, and of the relations between three perfect forms contemplated sincerely. In their unison and surroundings there is a wonderful language which is already as comprehensible to thee as if thou hadst created it. Out of any one of their outlines thou canst make the axis of a world. They seem to impart to thee the joy of continual creation and continual discovery, to help thee to complete thy harmony with a part of thyself unexpectedly revealed. They seem to pour into thee again the life which ages ago they received from thee. Hadst thou not enjoyed them even before they smiled on thee? As thou stoodest in silence beside them, was not thy soul within thee heavy as a cloud?”
“Oh despot,” I said, and felt my soul yearn with infinite desire towards the garden from which the harmonious twilight was bearing me away. “Ohdespot, it is true; as I stood in silence beside them, I felt stronger emotion than if I had loosed their hair, or pressed my lips on their beautiful necks, and I am still full of it. Yet, as the shadows fall, I would fain return there secretly; and invisible to the eye, I would lean my head on those virginal bosoms and tarry there a long while, because I think that from those bosoms there would flow over me in the cool shadow a great sweetness and a great sorrow which I shall never know.”