Gabriel had loved Domremy since the first June evening when its gray towers had dreamed to him from their green repose. In later years it had often solaced him with its plaintive loveliness, its eyrie whisperings of the past. Its grandeur had served as a bulwark against the prosaic sterility of modern minds. Like the dark and mysterious prophecy of some ancient alchemist, it put forth reality from the heart and throned the infinite in its stead.
Gabriel had spoken to Joan of the place in his letters. She knew Domremy well, had dreamed there even as he had done, and looked down upon the white lilies mimicking the face of the moon. The pair had plotted a tryst there, had met one April day on a path that ran from the hills, and wandered through the woods to the gray towers brooding over the water. They had climbed one of the turrets together, leaned upon the battlements, and turned back like children into the past.
The sky was dappled with innumerable isles of snow. The meadows were wondrous green under the blue heavens; the gnarled and naked trees glistened in the sun. Joan, her hat laid upon the parapet, stood like a damsel of old, her hair flashing gold in the eyes of romance. Gabriel leaned against the battlements two paces away, watching the woods and water and the face of the girl at his side.
“You are content?” he asked her.
She turned her eyes to his and smiled.
“Ask your own heart,” was her response.
Gabriel covered his eyes with his hand.
“How the past rises up to inspire me,” he said. “I could dream here day by day like a mystic, and know no sin. If we could stride back five centuries and take life like a crystal globe untarnished in our hands! Armor should flash in yonder woods; trumpets cry upon these towers. Ever should your face look out upon these meadows, like the face of evening out of a cloudless sky. As for me, I should be young again, and a man.”
She looked at him out of her trustful eyes of gray, while her face seemed full of a calm glory of honor. There was no shadow as yet over her soul.
“Would you begin life anew?”
The man’s hands gripped the stone.
“Would to God it could be so!” he said. “I have sold my soul’s birthright for red pottage, for unlovely ease, and cowardly sloth. Life is a battle-field, not a garden; I have been awakened to the truth too late.”
Joan pondered his words for a moment.
“Is it not possible to begin life anew?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We are so hedged by the ethics of the world that no escape is open. Fashion, vanity, prejudice, and greed—these are our task-masters. Life is like a path spiked on either side with thorns. We toil on in the dust while beyond us gleam the gardens of the blessed, unapproachable and lovely.”
“Who, then, are the blessed?”
“The blessed are those who have fought their fight like giants and have conquered. There are they who have scorned the laws of expediency and error. There are they who have lived true to their own souls. There are they who have not fallen to the flesh. Liberty is the guerdon, joy, and the light of truth.”
“And yet you are not among them.”
“I—indeed!”
There was a fine self-scorn in his voice that was almost dramatic.
“No,” he said; “I cannot flatter myself with any degree of heroism; it is only great souls who die for an ideal. The noblest life that was ever lived on earth had to end in a martyrdom that it might strike home to the hearts of men. I have been nothing but a martyr to my own egotism. Having once struck my colors to that black pirate Expediency on the high seas of life, I suppose I must be content to feel my soul in shackles.”
Joan was pulling at the moss upon the stones with her long, white fingers. Her eyes were on the distant woods; they were dark as with thought, and wondrously pathetic.
“A new sun seemed to swim into the sky,” she said, “when I read of the martyrdom on Calvary. That was a great life.”
“A life that changed history,” he answered her. “There have been many theorists, but none save Christ who proved his philosophy perfect in his own person.”
Joan was silent again for a while. The shadows of thought had deepened in her eyes till they looked like two pools of gloom.
“I have been thinking of that parable,” she said.
“Which parable?” he asked her.
“That which tells of the pearl of great price—where the man sold all that he had in order to possess it.”
“Yes.”
“There is profound truth to me in the words. Cannot a man take his inspiration from such a parable—sell all, dare all, to gain that single pearl. Is the present so pleasant to him that he is afraid to fling himself giant-like against custom.”
Gabriel looked at her as a man might look at one who prophesies. There was a sudden kindling of courage upon his face, but again a cloud soon covered it.
“No,” he said, slowly, “such a thing cannot be.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because the world is too strong for us; because it is impious to risk a woman’s honor; because the bonds of society are too rigid.”
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