Where Joan
stood, the peace of the time was broken only by a gentle dripping from the
leaves of a great laurel by the gate which led from the farmyard to the
fields. Below it, moist ground was stamped with the trident impress of many
fowls' feet; and, now and then, a feather sidled down from the heart of the
evergreen, where poultry, black and white and spangled, were settling to
roost. A subdued clucking and fluttering marked their hidden perches; then
came showers of rain-drops from the shining leaves as a bird mounted to a
higher branch; after which silence fell again.
And Joan found all hope fairly dead at last. There and then, in the misty
eveningtide, the fact fell on the ear of her heart as though one had spoken
it; and henceforth she dated disenchantment from that hour. The whole
pageant of her romance, with the knightly figure of the painter that filled
its foreground, shriveled to a scroll no bigger than a curled, dead
leaf--sere, wasted, ghostly, and light enough to be washed away on a tear,
borne away upon a sigh.
Then there followed for her prodigious transformations in the panorama of
Nature. Seen from the standpoint of his great, overwhelming lie to her, the
philosophy which this man had professed changed in its appearance, and that
mightily. He had used his cleverness like a net to trap her, and now,
though she could not prove his words untrue save in one particular, yet
that crowning act of faithlessness much tended to vitiate all the beauties
of imagination which had gone before it.
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