‘One night?’ said Nevil; ‘one?  Why only one?’

Renee shuddered.  ‘Oh! do not speak.’

‘Then, give me your hand.’

‘There, my friend.’

He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord.  She gave it as though it had been his own to claim.  But that it meant no more than a hand he knew by the very frankness of her compliance, in the manner natural to her; and this was the charm, it filled him with her peculiar image and spirit, and while he held it he was subdued.

Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil of rope for a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the recollection of that little sanguine spot of time when Renee’s life-blood ran with his, began to heave under him like a swelling sea.  For Nevil the starred black night was Renee.  Half his heart was in it:  but the combative division flew to the morning and the deadly iniquity of the marriage, from which he resolved to save her; in pure devotedness, he believed.  And so he closed his eyes.  She, a girl, with a heart fluttering open and fearing, felt only that she had lost herself somewhere, and she had neither sleep nor symbols, nothing but a sense of infinite strangeness, as though she were borne superhumanly through space.

CHAPTER IX

MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS

The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep the vessel on smoothly.  The night air dropped no moisture on deck.

Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour.  He was awakened by light on his eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles of grey and red rocks and shadowy high white regions at the head of the gulf waiting for the sun; and the sun struck them.  One by one they came out in crimson flame, till the vivid host appeared to have stepped forward.  The shadows on the snow-fields deepened to purple below an irradiation of rose and pink and dazzling silver.  There of all the world you might imagine Gods to sit.  A crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or flowing, shattered and arid, or leaning in smooth lustre, hangs above the gulf.  The mountains are sovereign Alps, and the sea is beneath them.  The whole gigantic body keeps the sea, as with a hand, to right and left.

Nevil’s personal rapture craved for Renee with the second long breath he drew; and now the curtain of her tent-cabin parted, and greeting him with a half smile, she looked out.  The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had heaven to themselves.  Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, white shelves, shining ledges, domes and peaks, all the towering heights were in illumination from Friuli into farthest Tyrol; beyond earth to the stricken senses of the gazers.  Colour was stedfast on the massive front ranks:  it wavered in the remoteness, and was quick and dim as though it fell on beating wings; but there too divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their white uncertain curves in sky like wings traversing infinity.