I wonder again, as the little wings fall from the folded sheet. At all events, that was our last day together in the fields. Since then the arrowhead has flowered in the brook--but not for us. That was our last summer-day.
Our last summer-day! I let your letters fall from my hands, Miranda, as I say over to myself, “Our last summer-day”--for it is again summer, “a summer-day in June.” How strange it seems, after all: summer again, and no Miranda. I could almost say with the sad Irish poet:
“Has summer come without the rose, And left the bird behind?”
For you, Miranda, seemed very summer herself. The sun-goddess you seemed, the blonde young mother of the green boughs and the knee-deep grass. When you looked upon the meadows they filled like the sky at evening with blue flowers, and when you spoke, the woods rang with a thousand birds. The very fish leaped up out of the talking stream to catch a glimpse of your shining hair. Wherever you passed life sprang up, abundant, blossoming, filled with the laughter of immortal summer.
Ah! to what enchanted youth, this “summer-day in June,” in what Broceliande of green boughs, or nymph-haunted secrecy of rocky pools, are you teaching the lesson of summer?
“A summer-day in June!” As I say those words over to myself, do you wonder, Miranda, that I should sorrow to part with the beautiful history of eight summers?
I suppose that I must send that history back, whatever my feelings as an art custodian may be. Miranda loves someone else and feels it only right to him. And I love someone else, and should, I suppose, feel it only right to her. Actually I have neither feeling. On the contrary, I hold that new love should be grateful to the old love for the lesson in loving which it has taught.
“I could not love thee so, dear love, Had I not loved before.”
So, I confidently believe that Miranda could not have loved her new love so adequately had she not loved me inadequately before. And, on the other hand, I am well aware that I could never have loved my true love as I do, had it not been for my eight years apprenticeship to Miranda.
Love is a mysterious spiritual training, and we are apt to learn its lessons too late to apply them. Surely it is not too late for Miranda. I can only hope that it is not too late for me.