Reverie's house beneath embowering
chestnuts, there advanced across the moonlit spaces to meet us a
figure on foot like ourselves, leading his horse. He was in armour,
yet unarmed. His steel glittered cold and blue; his fingers hung
ungauntleted; and on his pale face dwelt a look never happy warrior
wore yet. He seemed a man Mars lends to Venus out of war to unhappy
idleness. The disillusionment of age was in his face: yet he was
youthful, I suppose; scarce older than Mercutio, and once, perhaps, as
light of wit.
He took my hand in a grasp cold and listless, and smiled from
mirthless eyes.
Yet there was something strangely taking in this solitary
knight-at-arms. She for whom he does not fight, I thought, must have
somewhat of the immortals to grace her warrior with. And if it were
only shadows that beset him and obscured his finer heart, shadows they
were of myrtle and rhododendron, with voices shrill and small as the
sparrows', and eyes of the next-to-morning stars.
Indeed, these gardens whispered, and the wind at play in the air
seemed to bear far-away music, dying and falling.
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