Explore "The Pot of Basil" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The next day opened wild and wet. In the night a west wind had driven in from the sea, and drawn a rushing curtain over the rainbow summer of the gardens. Isabella, for no reason that she could define, felt strangely restless and uneasy. She was not wont to weather moods, or to feel impatience over enforced confinements to her rooms. Now, quite inexplicably, that prospect seemed insufferable; something in her cried out for space and freedom; the call of the wind and the rain reached to her for the first time, as though an unsuspected door in her heart had suddenly blown open. As sin or fever dreams of water, eternally of a cool and cleansing stream, so her soul turned with longing to the cold purification of the storm. And presently, unable to resist, she put on cloak and hood, and slipped out undetected into the gardens.
The rain came in her face and blew it as pink as a flower; the wind snatched at her hair, and caught and played with a fluttering wisp of it. As she went on, a spirit of exhilaration rose to possess her, quite alone and at liberty as she was. State and observance seemed unreal things; there was not a soul abroad to remind her of them; she and nature were in one confidence together, as if, like old companions long mistily estranged, they were as mistily reunited.