ASTOLAINE: My father!... (_She sobs and embraces the old man_.)
ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless ...
Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling shade.... They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile. While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he
"Wanders along the marble corridors That interlace their soundless floors around And to the centre of his royal home,"
singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line: _Allez où vos yeux vous mènent_. He thwarts the lovers' plans by shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither.... It is full of strange and stirless flowers.... They think they are embracing in the vestibules of Heaven.... But suddenly they hear the din of iron ringing on the rock above them.... Stones fall from the roof; and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful; the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish phosphorescent with decay."
Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers. She comes too late--they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to each other across the corridor that parts their beds: