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It had two windows, one looking out into a garden, such a garden! orange-trees with shining leaves and green and golden fruit and white flowers, and jasmines, and great lilies standing round about a marble court, in the midst of which was a basin of red marble, where a fountain was playing, making a delicious splashing; and out beyond these sparkled in the sun the loveliest and most delicious of blue seas the same blue sea, indeed, that Lucy had seen in her Italian visit.
Evening shadows crept on; soon the room was dark. Harriet entered with a shaded lamp, but her master motioned her out, and, throwing open the blinds, suffered the pure moonlight to enter freely. The window looked out on the flower garden, and the mingled fragrance of roses, jasmines, honeysuckles, and dew-laden four-o'clocks enveloped him as in a cloud of incense.
Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart.
The air seemed laden with the scent of all manner of white flowers, faint and heavy in their intolerable sweetness: tuberoses, gardenias, and jasmines drooping I know not where in neglected vases. The moonlight had transformed the marble floor around me into a shallow, shining, pool.
I quickened my pace, and, seized with an involuntary trembling, I crossed the billiard-room. At that moment I thought I saw a dark shadow pass under the windows of the ground floor, glide through the jasmines, and disappear in the twilight. I threw open the door of the drawing-room and stood still. There was not a sound, not a movement.
"Gloomy trellises, the verdurous roofs of which bore, like thousands of lustres, the gleaming grapes of the Promised Land; kiosks, where carved arabesques were entertwined with jasmines and climbing plants, the lianas of Asia; basins, into which the waters artificial they are here flowed from afar to leap and murmur in the marble jets of alleys lined with all the fruit trees of England, of Europe, and of the sunny Eastern climates; green leaves besprinkled with blossoming shrubs, and marble beds enclosing sheaves of flowers."
I kneel beside her and, taking her in my arms, kiss her fondly. Through the exquisite silence of the day, the church-bell rings out the Angelus in notes of gold. The garden is flooded with sunshine; and the marigolds, the phlox, the jasmines, the scabious and the mallows push their heads above their white railing. Each eager heart turns towards the light.
Yet my heart is sweet with the memory of the first fresh jasmines that filled my hands when I was a child. O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond, have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have nested in your branches and left you? Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at the tangle of your roots that plunged underground?
Without expecting that Myrtle would rush into his arms, he did think that she could not help listening to him in the intervals of the delicious music, in some recess where the roses and jasmines and heliotropes made the air heavy with sweetness, and the crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds that half hid their forms from the curious eyes all round them.
At the moment that their attendants were placing two wreaths of their favourite jasmines on their brows, the Caliph, who had just heard of the tragical catastrophe, arrived; he looked not less pale and haggard than the Gouls, that wander at night among graves; forgetful of himself and every one else, he broke through the midst of the slaves, fell prostrate at the foot of the sofa, beat his bosom, called himself “atrocious murderer!” and invoked upon his head a thousand imprecations; with a trembling hand he raised the veil that covered the countenance of Nouronihar, and, uttering a loud shriek, fell lifeless on the floor.
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