They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at
the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the
casement of the land seductively.
'It's the finest night I have seen,' said Siegmund. Helena's eyes
suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness.
'I like the moon on the water,' she said.
'I can hardly tell the one from the other,' he replied simply. 'The sea
seems to be poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the
coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say,
are all you.' 'Yes,' she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and
she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her
now, and did not need her.
'I feel at home here,' he said; 'as if I had come home where I was
bred.' She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him.
'We go an awful long way round, Helena,' he said, 'just to find we're
all right.' He laughed pleasantly. 'I have thought myself such an
outcast! How can one be outcast in one's own night, and the moon always
naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?' Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt
something of the harmony.
'Whatever I have or haven't from now,' he continued, 'the darkness is a
sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and
sometimes the sea is a brother: and there's a family in one house,
you see.' 'And I, Siegmund?' she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She
looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit
ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed,
then bent to kiss her.
'The key of the castle,' he said. He put his face against hers, and felt
on his cheek the smart of her tears.
'It's all very grandiose,' he said comfortably, 'but it does for
tonight, all this that I say.' 'It is true for ever,' she declared.
'In so far as tonight is eternal,' he said.
He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from
under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon.
They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night.